App hanging on "Waiting for GPS"

We are getting some reports of the app hanging at the front screen with “Waiting for GPS” displayed. This has been hard for us to reproduce as it has not occurred in our testing – until today when we were messing around with some changes.
It seems that the code we use to recognize that you have successfully installed the app is failing on some devices.
There is an initial interaction with our web site which requires your watch to be connected to your phone and your phone to have internet connection – which is the normal situation when you first install the app on your watch.
In addition, this interaction should only happen once because the app should remember the result of that interaction, which is a long code (called a Globally Unique ID, or “GUID”) that is unique to your watch.
Issue #1 “App not storing the GUID”:
We are finding that under some, yet to be fully understood condition, the app fails to remember the GUID and so tries to get one each time the app starts.
This is why some users – and I stress, only “some”, are finding that the app fails to start when the watch is remote from the phone or the phone does not have an internet connection. For those users, you will have to start the app connected to a connected phone. Once started, it will continue to operate remotely fro the phone. We are working to understand and fix the problem.
Issue #2: “GCM not fully connected”
In addition, just to make our and your lives harder, there is an intermittent issue with the Garmin’s phone app (GCM) which fails to connect to the watch (Bluetooth) or fails to connect to the internet. A solution to this is to do a “cold restart” of GCM.
To do this, stop the app and remove it from the phone’s current apps:
On iOS double-tap the Home key and swipe the app off the list of current apps.
On Android, tap the menu button and swipe GCM off the list of recent apps.
Then restart GCM, wait for it to connect to your watch and then start raceQs on your watch.

Sorry about the hassles, we are working on a solution.
Your comments and observations will help us resolve this more quickly.

Topic

[Alan Smith]

How many of you are old enough to remember being told to Ctrl-Alt-Del to fix a problem? Well, it’s time to relive that memory!

Issue #1, where the app was not remembering the the GUID is fixed with a “cold start” of the watch with a long press of both buttons till it switches off, then restart the watch with a press of the left button.

After a couple of frustrating days trying to find the problem in my code (that was never there), I have concluded that the watch’s operating system was knotted up somehow and the restart cleared the problem.

It explains why we hadn’t experienced the problem before, because it’s such an unusual condition.

So If the app refuses to run without being connected to your phone with an internet connection, please try this “cold start” procedure described above.

 

[Author]

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